


Lies Buried

by Anonymous



Category: Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-06 05:50:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16382582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Lockwood and Lucy and a Halloween case.





	Lies Buried

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Megkips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megkips/gifts).



> Hope you like the fic! Happy Halloween!

Halloween: every agent's least favorite time of the year. Once, apparently, it had been a day where small children dressed up as various "scary" things and went around asking for candy. These days, of course, people stayed inside in well-lit areas and kept their fireplace pokers at the ready. The veil between our world and the next thinned, or something like that, and the ghost population increased drastically. Most of them would go away in reasonably short order, but that didn't do much for the poor people who had a ghost suddenly appearing in their kitchen. 

Which is how I came to be standing in Ms. Patel's kitchen on the night of October thirtieth, parrying a blow from a woman holding what appeared to be a ghostly frying pan. Lockwood was slipping around behind her, silver net at the ready - we still hadn't found her Source, but dropping the net on her would at least get her away from me for long enough for us to go looking. Quietly enough that the ghost didn't realize what was happening before the net hit, he threw the net over her. She vanished like morning mist. 

"Thanks," I said, brushing my hair out of my face. "She came out of _nowhere_." 

He nodded. "No problem." Still wary of the ghost reforming, we began investigating the kitchen. The owner had said she'd remodeled in the last year, so the Source was probably related to a chunk of iron moving. Or maybe salt; we'd had a case once where moving the salt in a kitchen reorganization had unleashed a ghost. 

"She said she'd moved the cabinets, didn't she?" I finally asked.

"Yeah," Lockwood said. "Are you thinking she stored cast iron in there?"

"I am," I said. I clambered up on the counter and started checking for hollow areas behind the walls - unfortunately we didn't know where the old cabinets had been. I came up with nothing. 

I slid down from the counter, then froze at the hollow sound below my feet. I was standing very near the silver net. When I knelt, the floor was frigid - not quite cold enough for ice to form, but close. "Lockwood!" I hissed, standing and tapping at the floorboards again. There was definitely a space underneath. 

He looked up from where he'd been investigating the cupboards under the sink and crossed over to me. "Find something?" Then his feet hit the hollow patch. "Oh."

"Yeah," I said. "It's cold, too." 

"I can feel it," he said. The cold did seem to be getting stronger. I could feel it through my boots now, and the thermometer, which Lockwood had brought over, was reading just above freezing. 

"She's gathering her strength," I said. "We should get in there now."

He nodded and went to get the crowbar. I stood ready with a pouch of lavender and salt. As the floorboard came up, I splashed the mixture over the hollow. Inside, coated in a rapidly melting layer of ice, we found a wooden spoon. It had been worn smooth with age. Faintly visible on the handle was a carved symbol - three straight lines, with a plus sign underneath.

I picked it up gingerly, the silver net wrapped around my hand. "What do you think this mark on the handle means?" I asked. 

"Can't say," Lockwood said, peering at it. "Might be something important to the person who made it." 

I slipped it into a silverglass jar and screwed the lid shut. "I suppose it doesn't really matter now," I said, tucking it into a pocket of our bags. He began picking up our equipment - the circle of chains we'd left in another room as a fallback, the net he'd thrown over the ghost and I'd used as hand protection, and so on. I started trying to put the floor back together. 

In the distance, bells chimed. "Midnight," Lockwood said. "It's Halloween." 

I felt oddly at peace, for Halloween. "And we're already done with this job. Good work, us."

He grinned, as bright as ever. "Happy Halloween, Lucy." 

"Happy Halloween," I said.


End file.
